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Rob Magiera, the founder and principal of Noumena Digital (
www.studionoumena.com
), was trained as a traditional painter, but he embraced digital illustration in 1986. He saw in digital techniques the potential for constant, immediate revisions.

After working for years with two-dimensional applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, Magiera taught himself how to use three-dimensional applications, which opened up new creative possibilities for the designer.

"As an artist, I was always fascinated by the unique qualities that various media offered and how they could be exploited to add to the overall effectiveness of the finished art," Magiera says. "I gravitated to 3-D because it's the one area of computer graphics that is completely unique -- you can't do it without a computer. Your canvas is now totally plastic. You can invent something that hasn't been seen before."

Alias Maya Complete ($2,000; 866/226-8859,
www.alias.com
) lets designers create three-dimensional worlds out of nothing. While Maya is known primarily as an animation tool, Magiera uses it for print projects that would otherwise be unthinkable. It's a complex program, but with that complexity comes extraordinary control.

This level of control is evident in Magiera's reality-bending work on an American Express card ad campaign. The campaign's art director wanted to depict the credit cards from different angles. However, it wasn't feasible to use a camera to shoot all the real cards, each in every language of the campaign, each from several different angles. And faking shots in Photoshop wouldn't produce images credible enough to hold up at the huge sizes required for the campaign.

Using 3-D technology in combination with Photoshop and Illustrator, Magiera manipulated a virtual card. This required relatively little time and expense yet produced a highly realistic result. For each version of the American Express ad, Magiera used the original Maya model, simply changing the text when necessary, repositioning the card, and rendering it again.

Says Magiera, "If you were starting with a photograph and retouching it, how could you shoot 30 cards and stay in budget -- eight variations of each card, each ad with a different angle? It's an ad campaign they wouldn't have done."